De Emmi Bevensee. Artículo original: Social-Anarchism and Parallel Economic Computation de 22 de junio 2020. Traducido en español por Kathiana Thomas. Nota: He tratado de minimizar la teoría matemática y computacional para hacer esto más legible en general, pero donde se pone más complicado sólo escribí (párrafo matemático) antes del párrafo, pudiendo entender la pieza…

This episode is Part II of a two-part interview with Aurora Apolito and William Gillis, two of the lead contributors to our summer symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. Listen to Part I here, or on Spotify, iTunes, and Stitcher. Aurora Apolito is a mathematician and theoretical physicist. She studied physics in Italy and mathematics in Chicago, and…

This episode is Part I of a two-part interview with Aurora Apolito and William Gillis, two of the lead contributors to our summer symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. Listen to Part II here.  Aurora Apolito is a mathematician and theoretical physicist. She studied physics in Italy and mathematics in Chicago, and later worked for various scientific institutions…

I must confess no small horror on reading M Black’s contribution to this Mutual Exchange. A self-professed anarchist, defending centralization? I would normally let such arguments fall on their face alone, but if we are to platform them in this exchange I feel a moral obligation to reiterate basic reality. My response will be divided…

For a few years now, Modern Money Theory, or MMT, has been the hottest buzzword in economics. The insights of MMT regarding our nation’s spending debate have been simultaneously misunderstood, disregarded, and celebrated. In this essay I will explain the central argument of MMT. I will explore why its conclusions are dangerous in the wrong…

I want to begin by praising Apolito’s piece. It both tackles the strongest argument against anarchism, the problem of achieving coordination at scale, and models the problem using insights from the cluster of fields that lie at the base of complex systems. Whatever my disagreements with them over markets, this is a welcome addition to…

Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale: Does Anarchism Skirt the Calculation Problem? pubblicato il 13 luglio 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Qualcuno si sorprenderà, ma a differenza di molti anarchici del mercato liberato di C4SS, non sono un anarchico di mercato per via della questione del calcolo economico. Credo ovviamente che la questione del calcolo economico…

Di Asem. Originale pubblicato il 9 luglio 2020 con il titolo We Are in Midst of a Seismic Shift, It Is up to Labor to Decide the Outcome. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Un decennio fa usciva The Third Industrial Revolution, seguito alcuni anni dopo da The Zero Marginal Cost Society dello stesso autore, un economista…

Emmi Bevensee’s article “Social-Anarchism and Parallel Economic Computation” is an excellent and important introduction to the challenges that complexity poses for economic planning. I think Emmi’s conclusion—that we need to sketch what the limits of planning are and pursue alternative mechanisms beyond this point—is a good one, as is pointing out that problems arise when…

I’m a big fan of Aurora and hope that her contribution to this symposium helps encourage more anarchists to engage fearlessly with the mathematical dynamics of an anarchist society. But I must admit my disappointment, I was hoping her contribution would seriously engage with the arguments for markets and either present a novel alternative or…

Let me begin by stating how happy I am that this exchange is happening. As information technology has come to saturate our lives over the last two decades we’ve seen the debate over non-market economies remerge. A recent essay published in The Economist1 both summarizes the discourse and speaks to its increasing prominence. In the…

Now it may surprise some, but unlike many fellow freed market anarchists at C4SS, I am not a market anarchist because of the economic calculation problem. While I do think the economic calculation problem rightly points out that top-down command economies cannot adequately produce and distribute goods to meet the needs of society, anarchist economic…

About a decade ago The Third Industrial Revolution was published, and a few years later The Zero Marginal Cost Society came out by the same author, from a mainstream and politically moderate economist who advises the EU and German government, making very radical predictions such as moving to a society without money as a result…

Note: In order to properly display some of the mathematics in this piece, it’s hosted here as a .pdf. Or, click the image below the introduction. The problem of scale is perhaps the most fundamental problem of anarchism. We all know by direct experience that anarchism works well on a local scale. Most people who…

Note: I’ve tried to minimize the math and computation theory to make this more generally readable but where it gets more complex I just wrote (math paragraph) before the paragraph and you can read or skip it and still understand the piece. I’ll open with a potentially contentious take. Most of the decentralized and left-leaning…

In 1939, Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician, came up with a formulation for optimization problems called linear programming (LP) after being tasked with planning production in the plywood industry during World War 2. A linear program is a constrained optimization problem with a linear objective function that is maximized or minimized subject to linear equality…